How Far We've Come
by catastrophechao
Summary: They lost this game 17 years ago.


Authors Note: I wrote this for my reviewers… Not because I have so many, or because they asked for it, but because I got a review the other day and it made me remember that I really do love to write this stuff. Thank you for the inspiration and motivation!

How Far We've Come

Yukio dreams.

It's the end of the word. The sky is a dull red and columns of smoke rise from the ground to wind lazily through still air. Darker clouds hover on the horizon, punctuated by heat lightning and the unrelenting roll of thunder.

He is in a bar – or maybe it's a restaurant, it's hard to tell – either way the lights are dim and there are too many people.

_Far_ too many people. They fill the faux leather booths and line the counter. They are seated at tiny tables up front, and big sprawling tables in the back, and they're standing in lines up and down each tiled aisle.

They talk to each other in snatches of real conversation - "It's too cold for that," and "I'll have cherry," and "How long do you think it'll last?" – rather than the empty susurration common to dreams and film production.

A part of him wonders what it means, even as another whispers: Nothing. It means nothing.

There are people who dream true, but Yukio is not among them.

The patrons talk to one another, but not to him. Not even to say 'pardon' when they slide past. No one touches him either, a greater irregularity, as Yukio is eminently jostle-able. People bump his shoulder or knock his elbow when there's space to spare. But not now, not here, where there is no room to give. He wonders, idly, if it's a subconscious protection of an arm no longer broken.

Shura is there; part of a crowd milling by the door. She has one hand on the window, fingers resting against the glass, as she watches the sky fall.

She's wearing an expression Yukio doesn't know. It has none of violence of action and reaction that he is accustomed to seeing on her face. She looks distant, reflective, preoccupied maybe, as if she's thinking of something or someone very far away. He thinks she might be little sad, or it may be that this is simply how her face settles in repose.

She doesn't notice him, not even when he places a hand next to hers on the glass. He spreads his fingers, brushes her pinky with his thumb. Her skin is cold, which is strange, because the window, though darkly tinted, is body warm.

There are other people he recognizes. Neuhaus and Noriko and Konekumaru in a booth at the back. One of Mamushi's sisters, sipping soda with a cherry in it from a tall green glass.

Shima's at the jukebox, just inside a hall that leads back toward the kitchen or the bathrooms -and it is a restaurant, Yukio's almost certain, they serve pizza – tapping through the song list.

Yukio says his name. Calls "Shima!"above the background of conversation –"not too much longer," and "I can get it," and "he was taller than I expected." – but the pink-haired guide-spy-babysitter doesn't even look up.

And Rin is at the bar.

Yukio stares at his back: the narrow shoulders and the messy dark hair, the tail whipping back and forth. He's ordering something- leaning forward and gesticulating wildly, leaning backward and waving at the menu. Yukio cannot catch his voice, which means he isn't making any sound, because Yukio can _always_ hear Rin. Always. It is fact, like sunrise and weather.

He waits while Rin finishes his mute order, waits for him to turn around. Yukio is not carrying a weapon in this dream, which is neither unusual nor common, but still disappointing.

The body language is more egregious head on.

Rin has a naturally eager manner, but it is constrained. He holds his limbs close to his body, not like Yukio as a child, not like someone trying to escape notice, but like a man accustomed to bumping into things – a man who has had to learn to be careful.

This man moves nothing like that. He is expansive, with an unnecessarily wide stance and open posture that comes off as a challenge. In fact, he moves very much like Mephisto, albeit with more swagger and less grace. He takes no less than twice the space needed for even the simplest gestures- and none of his gestures are simple.

He comes toward Yukio like a man wading through swampland, pulling himself through the close air with great swings of his arms, his strides too long for his body.

And it is not Rin's voice – not anyone's voice, really - that calls to him from across the room. It is the rumble of an earthquake and the grumble of thunder. It's the rattle of silverware, the call of a cat, mist settling in a valley at night. It is all the other voices in the dream – the asinine conversation compressed into a series of tones, fricatives, and vowels. "Have you seen my keys?" mixes with the static of electric lines and the shudder of a storm and the distant incessant beeping of a timer gone off to become: "Boy! Welcome!"

It is a terrible voice. Human and inhuman at once, and it lodges in Yukio's head like bullet. It's _all_ in his head. All in his head.

His head hurts.

Satan braces his hands on his hips and laughs.

That does not help.

"Sit down! Sit down!" He orders, and Yukio hears the crackle of a brush fire, the pop of a newly opened soda, a woman laughing. There is a table at his side, conveniently empty. Yukio sits. He's not sure the movement is voluntary.

Satan joins him. "Pretty grim here, isn't it?" he remarks, gesturing in a way that manages to encompass the dream in its entirety: people and table and room and a rust red sky and beyond that, oh yeah, the end of the world.

Yukio raises a shoulder in a minimalistic shrug.

"I mean, I like it! Don't get me wrong. It's not a bad aesthetic." When Satan grins it is with Rin's lips and Rin's teeth, but it is not Rin's smile.

Yukio does not generally chat with demons, but this is a dream, and besides, after shooting his brother in the head and defecting to the Illuminati, what is one principle more or less? He opts to make conversation. "They're dead," he says. And everyone is. Shura and Shima and Konekumaru, the man missing his keys, Mamushi's little sister, the girl of the stolen laugh. Yukio himself. They're all dead. Of course they are: It's the end of the world.

Satan surveys the room, "More or less," he agrees, and waves at a waitress working her way through the crowd toward them. She smiles sweetly, leaves pizza and the check. Yukio spares a moment to be profoundly grateful that she does not speak. That he does not have to hear her voice twisted and twined into Satan's dulcet tones.

Satan gestures in invitation, but Yukio shakes his head.

You don't eat, he thinks, in the land of the dead.

"You're not Greek," Satan remarks, and stuffs pizza into his mouth - Yukio expects something terrible, death's head moths and maggots, perhaps, but it's just steak and onion and what looks like egg yolk ...Rin's favorite, he realizes, and then it's terrible enough. "But suit yourself."

"Well?" Satan prompts eventually, and there's sauce on his teeth like blood. "Don't you want to ask me something? Like, why you? I mean, of all the people in the world, why _you_."

Yukio shrugs again. He knows the answer. It is nothing more or less than because he is there, and because Satan can. It's not about Yukio, in particular. It is not personal. He is not special.

"Not about any of you." Satan says, reaching for a second slice.

Yukio presses his lips into a thin, straight line. "And Rin?"

"My son." Satan beams at the mention. "No," He adds.

Yukio supposes he should take comfort in the fact that Satan's interest in Rin is, ultimately, every bit as utilitarian as his interest in Yukio. He doesn't. But now he has a question.

"If Rin's your son, then what am I?"

It is Satan's turn to shrug. "Not mine." He says, "Well… No more than any of you-" He gestures around the room again, "are all God's children." And Yukio has to wait while he laughs – head thrown back and hands outstretched like a comic book villain. "I'm God." He adds when he's done, in case Yukio hasn't caught on.

Yukio is struck by the fact that thus far, the only similarity he can see between the Lord of Gehenna and his elder brother is that they are both idiots.

Satan misses the thought, caught up in musings of his own. "Could be hers, I guess." He cocks his head to the side and peers at Yukio, squinting. "You look like her, in any case."

Yukio does not ask who he means.

"That would've been fair," Satan continues, "One for me and one for her." Yukio considers explaining to him that this is not the way babies work, but stops as Satan's expression goes sour, like he's lost a game he'd taken for easy. "Doesn't matter now, though," The clatter of plates, water running, a muffled curse- damn, fuck. "She's dead." He explains. "Really dead, I mean." He snorts, looking out over the crowd. "Not like this rabble, rotting away in the purgatory of life." They are still chatting, eating pizza and drinking soda, while outside ash drifts from the sky like fresh snow. "Yappy little things, aren't they? Of course, she loved them. She loved everything." That sour look again: old resentment, jealousy, baffled anger. "I would have let her keep them. Or some of them, at least. In a garden, maybe. Or a…" he sketches a shape in the air, a rough square, "You know, a terrarium."

Yukio does not want to admit it, but he can see where some segments of humanity- all of it, that voice whispers, coiling at the back of his mind- might do a better in a terrarium. Rin would disagree, of course. Rin, the devil's son. Hmph.

"Might be her son," Satan says again, and gazes at him consideringly.

"I don't think so." Yukio says.

"Me neither."

Satan eats pizza. Yukio people-watches. There really are so many of them. Too many. Masses of people, everywhere, pressed against everything. And Shura at the window. Fuck.

He turns his attention to his hands, resting empty on the scarred tabletop, but still he sees them. Shima at the jukebox. Mamushi's little sister with a cherry on her tongue. He feels his chest constrict.

"If you're here," Yukio asks, carefully, "does that mean you're dead, as well?" It's his third question. He doesn't know if that matters. He doesn't know if anything matters.

Satan grins – Rin's lips and teeth, but not his smile. "Only for now."

"The end of the world." Yukio murmurs, to no one, to himself.

Satan laughs, a hearty healthy thing. "Your dream," he says, "not mine."

Yukio wakes to red rusty stains the color of sky on his pillow and the tang of iron in his mouth. He drags himself to the bathroom to wash up, wiping away crusts of blood from his eyes, his nose, one of his ears. It means nothing, he tells himself, nothing. There are people who dream true, and Yukio is _not_ among them.

In the back of his mind there's the hum of an air conditioning unit, the chime of a pachinko machine, a baby, crying.

Yukio wakes.

But not really.


End file.
